


Lesser Birds on the Four Winds

by Honeymull



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 2009 imported work, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 16:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17646500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Honeymull/pseuds/Honeymull
Summary: When they buy the house, it’s already been four years since the Apocalypse.





	Lesser Birds on the Four Winds

Dean sits on the porch, knees hanging over the top step, bottle of Corona held loosely at his side. He takes a swig, listens to the susurrus of the pear trees' leaves and tries to find the pair of owls he knows is skulking deep in their foliage. They’ve chanted their eerie hymns into the night ever since the sun sank into the darkening horizon, and now they rise up and fly, swelling up out of the branches and winging out over the roof of the house in silence, out of Dean’s sight. 

“Pretty cool. I think they have a nest somewhere.” Sam drops down beside Dean, nudging him over as he goes with an elbow to the side of Dean's head. Dean swings a loose shoulder into Sam’s gut as Sam drops, and the resulting oomph he hears makes his lips curl up, just a bit. 

When Sam’s situated – stretched out like a cat, lazy and long, pressed shoulder and hip against Dean – he procures a bottle of his own from the cooler behind Dean, taps it on the porch railing to take off the cap, and sighs. 

Dean slants a glance at him. “Hard day, honey?” 

Sam ignores the snarky tone and ironic eyebrow. He answers seriously, and that makes something shift uncomfortably in Dean’s gut. “Yes.”

Dean focuses on the dark smudge of woods beyond their backyard - god, that's still weird: their backyard - and doesn’t say anything. Sam usually gives in without prompting, letting the carefully hoarded words he can’t say during the day spill out like freed prisoners to blink in the sun or breathe the night air. 

“Everybody else? They're so excited about next week and I still have a million things I could be doing. Should be doing. Should have done before now, and now it’s almost here and I’m never going to actually finish and. I don't know. It’s crazy, that’s all.” 

Sam toys with the beer label, and Dean can watch his fingers move if he tilts his head just so to one side, letting his eyes follow the finicky rub of Sam’s fingers over the smooth paper. He catches himself before it goes on too long, and clears his throat. Sits up a little straighter and lets the minute movement shift him away from Sam. Just a few inches. 

If Sam notices, he doesn’t let on. Dean rewards himself by clapping a heavy hand on Sam’s knee, using it to lever himself up. “You’ll be fine, Sammy. People do this every day. You’re good at normal, remember?”

Sam huffs out a tiny laugh. He rubs his thumb fitfully over the condensation on the neck of his bottle, and Dean’s palm tingles with the warmth he felt through the knee of Sam’s jeans. He wipes his hand on his shirt, knocks the butt of his empty Corona against the slumping back of Sam’s head, says, “You’ll be fine, dude”, and goes inside. 

*

 

When they buy the house, it’s already been four years since the Apocalypse. Or, the pseudo-apocalypse, Sam insists on calling it, since nothing actually ended, and he’ll go on for hours if Dean can’t distract him from it in time. (This is what Angus Young’s vocals were really intended for, Dean thinks: making his little brother veer off any other subject in order to complain pointlessly about screeching voices sounding like two sick cows mating. Dean generally just turns Angus up higher, drums the steering wheel when Sam raises his voice, and only changes the tape to the more Sam-friendly BOC when Sam crosses his arms and shuts up. Positive reinforcement, Dean thinks, and grins around the lyrics to Astronomy.)

Four years, and they’re still looking over their shoulders. Still changing the Impala’s plates every year or so, still wary and vigilant. But things are different now, and they adjust slowly. They’re not stupid, but they let their guard down a little more each day, when hunts fail to turn up, when nothing evil leaps at them from the darkness of these new nights.

They both change. They can’t not, with all they’ve been through. But without the heavy mantle of responsibility pressing heavily on their napes, crawling down their spines and directing their every move, they sink back, slowly, haltingly, into something approaching what they used to be.

Sam leaves for about a month - right after he comes inches away from leading earth into hell like lambs to the slaughter. Goes who-knows-where while Dean sleeps in the Impala more nights than not – no reason to rent a motel room if it’s just him, and he’s more comfortable in the backseat, anyway. Sam returns after 40 days, hungry and thirsty and so tired it hurts Dean just to look at him.

Dean stares at him anyway, until Sam lowers the water bottle he drains in five long gulps and tells him to knock it off, scraping the words from his throat with an effort. When Sam smiles (or tries to: it’s a feeble, tenuous thing), Dean looks away.

*

 

Sam doesn’t follow him inside for another hour, and Dean’s stretched out on the couch, half-asleep, when he hears the screen door slam shut. He can hear Sam moving around the kitchen, the dull thud of Sam’s steps on the wood floors of the hallway, the groan and creak as Sam opens a window somewhere behind Dean. 

The night breeze tiptoes in behind Sam, and Dean slits an eye open as he feels a presence at the end of the couch. 

Sam’s a shadowy shape at the end of the couch, blurry at the edges, and still. 

Dean lets his eyes fall closed again, burrows further into the cushions. “What.” His voice is a sleepy rasp.

Sam doesn’t answer, and as the minutes pass, Dean falls asleep again, feeling Sam standing over him in the darkness.

*

 

Sam claims he’s fine now. No powers, no visions, no taint in his blood.  
They run into a lone demon about a week after Sam comes stumbling in from the wide Mojave Desert on his self-imposed exile. It’s weak and scared, but it puts up a desperate fight when they corner it. 

Sam fights with his words, with his hands and body, and not once does Dean see an inkling of anything else at work, not once, when blackness pours out of that haggard gambler’s mouth and screams its way back to hell. 

They do damage control for about a year, rounding up the evil that lies hidden deep in the earth and gotten its claws entrenched in daily lives. By the end of that year, hunts are few and far between, forces they barely understand drawing back to lick their wounds for another hundred years or so. 

They drive aimlessly, heading in a wide sine-curve west from Nevada into California. 

Dean drives past Stanford once, past the neat rows of trees and prestigious brick buildings. Sam stares out the window at it, and when he turns to face Dean, his face is dim and drawn. “Not here.”

Dean gives a nod, understanding, and presses harder on the gas. They speed past in silence. 

*

 

“Here” turns out to be Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Dean slips the Harvard Law applications into Sam’s laptop, then ignores Sam’s clumsy attempts to ask him about them the next morning. 

Sam gives him shrewd, censoring looks the entire day, forehead wrinkling at Dean’s guileless shrug, at his raised eyebrows and changed subjects. 

Even so, Dean wakes up to the squeak of Sam’s ballpoint pen across the pages that night. Sam’s hunched over the thick motel end-table, eyes about three inches from his words, oblivious to Dean’s stare. 

Dean lets his breath out in a quiet exhale, tugs the covers up to his ears again, and sleeps well the rest of the night.

*

 

They head out across New England, stopping to look up old contacts of Bobby’s, checking into an elderly couple’s claim of a ghost in their attic (turns out to just be squirrels in the drywall), tracking a pack of vampires through Delaware, making sure they only kill cows and other animals. The pack is more than willing to comply, casting openly frightened looks at Sam, standing silently at Dean’s side. 

The demon possessing the pretty bartender Casey had warned Dean that the name Samuel Winchester was known throughout the far reaches of hell, and Dean sees more signs of that now than ever. Demons flinch from it now as if it were a holy name, blessed. The pack of vampires recognizes Sam by sight, and they’re so obviously cowed that Dean doesn’t even get to use his machete once. 

He’s pissed and restless the rest of the night, looking too long at Sam and drinking too deep from the whiskey flask in his jacket. When Sam asks if they can swing into the bordering county when they leave in the morning, Dean snaps a “No” before he realizes what Sam’s asking.

They have a drop-box in a quiet, tucked-away town there, one of a pair of boxes under their real names, the other on the opposite side of the country. 

Sam wants to check their mail.

If Dean had been anybody else, someone who hadn’t held his little brother’s hand countless times, through long nights waiting up for Dad in the dark, who’d molded his palm against Sam’s smaller one around a pencil, teaching the plains and valleys of the alphabet in ink, stitched cuts closed and wrapped sprained and familiar fingers - he’d never have seen the slight tremble in Sam’s hands as he opened the HSL-stamped letter. 

When Sam looks up from it with a tiny smile tip-tilting the edges of his lips, Dean can’t keep the grin off his own face. He crosses the room to clap Sam on the back, and steers him out the door to get some beers at the nearest pub. 

They buy the house a month later, when the reality of his admission - of his future - has sunk in deep, lighting Sam up inside, with a soft backlit gleam only Dean can see.

*

 

It’s home, by now. Dean thinks he probably went crazy years ago. That's the only explanation he can figure for the level of comfort and security he feels, wrapped up in this little split-level house tucked away in the woods behind Harvard. 

But it’s true – he has a job as a mechanic about twenty minutes away. He spends his days there while Sam’s holed up in classrooms bent over books, comes home and cooks dinner, takes his food to eat on the back porch with a beer, and waits for Sam. 

And it’s this feeling, this contentment that’s smooth as river-rocks that’s moved into Dean so slowly and gently he never felt it settle within him before it was there. Every time he looks at Sam, he feels it. Every time he pulls the Impala into the driveway, slides her snugly into the garage she calls home too. Every time he wakes up in a bed, his bed, or drifts off to sleep in the grass outside on summer nights when he’s full and warm and buzzed and can’t be bothered to come inside, he feels it. 

He’ll be groggy the next morning, coming awake with a disgruntled snort and sleepy eye-blinks, catching himself on the side of the couch before he falls off, remembering he’s not in his bed just in time. He’ll wake up and make coffee blacker than black, and crinkle his eyes in greeting at Sam over his mug when Sam ambles into the kitchen, yawning wide, seeking Cheerios.  
He’ll be Dean Winchester, mechanic, and Dean Winchester, older brother, and he’s good at that, happy with that.

But right now, in the ginger, muted world of sleep, he dreams of just a little more, of that cracked and muddy hope that dangles just out of reach, of Sam’s smile and skin and –

*

 

Sam graduates on the hottest day of the year, with a pinprick sun and clouds in a messy Picasso scrawl across the sky.

He’s nervous, can’t fasten the robe at his neck, and finally looks beseechingly at Dean.

Dean rolls his eyes, but levers himself from his slouch against the wall, bats Sam’s hands away and slips the buttons through the loops, the clasps coming together easily at his touch. 

Sam says, “Thank you”. His voice is low, so close, and Dean drops his hands. Steps away and gets a good look at his little brother, standing tall in that billowing robe, and pride swells in his chest, soul-deep and light as air.  
Sam blows out a breath. “This is silly, Dean. It’s not always going to be this quiet, you know it.” 

Dean gives him a look. “You’re a Winchester. You don’t half-ass things. You’re getting the degree if I have to drag you across the stage myself, okay? Stop being such a pussy.”

Sam snorts, and Dean favors him with a sideways grin. It looks like Sam’s about to say something – he gets a look in his eyes that Dean can’t quite recognize and leans forward, into his space – but the graduation bells start their thundering cries at that moment, and Sam’s head shoots up.

The look he gives Dean is pure panic before he smoothes out his features, and Dean brings both hands up to brace on Sam’s shoulders. “You’ve earned it, man. Go get your fucking law degree, geekboy.”

Sam swallows – and there’s that look again, fleetingly cast in Dean’s direction – before he gives a shaky jerk of his head that Dean takes for a nod, and goes to join the queue of graduating law students congregating in the hall. Dean blows out a breath, and goes to sit in the white wicker chairs set up for the friends and family of graduates on the lush campus lawn.

When Samuel J. Winchester’s name is called, he earns his row-mates’ dirty looks with a holler and a wolf-whistle amid the applause. 

Sam just beams, looking dazed as he shakes the officiating professor’s hand, curls his hand around the paper scroll and holds on tight.

*

 

Sam’s giddy with shock as he commences the talking to the half-million people he says he needs to thank, shaking their hands and earnestly seeking out the next person, until Dean goes to wait by the Impala. 

Dean uncurls himself from the hood when Sam walks up, eyes shining, and Sam doesn’t even slow down, just pulls him into a hug, exuberant and unapologetic when he steps back. 

His excitement mellows out on the car ride home, smoothing into a soft kind of joy that makes Dean ache inside. 

The screen door bangs into the wall like always when they walk in, and then it’s quiet. 

Sam puts his degree on the kitchen table, and turns. 

Two steps, and he’s in Dean’s space, big hands cradling Dean’s neck, bending his head to brush his lips over Dean’s. 

It’s light, almost – and not at all – brotherly, and it roots Dean to the floor. 

“Don’t make me call you an idiot, because we both know you’re not, Dean. But seriously?” Sam chuffs out a little laugh, still bent close, palms still wide on Dean’s skin. “This is…” He leans in, noses at Dean’s throat. “Long, long overdue.”

*

 

_They hear it once, then never again: the heartbreaking chorus of a thousand angelic voices raised in harmony. The earth shudders on its axis, the sun blinks out, and the world ends, for just one minuscule millisecond of time._

_It's not enough to wipe out human civilization, not as it is, and nobody recognizes the small slice of apocalypse for what it was. But it gives the demons massing in the barren wilderness of hell a glimpse of what could be. And it's not the apocalypse they look for. Pray for, in their own bitter way._

_Evil has always and will always want something to rule, even if it’s the collapsed and filthy ruins of a civilization, brought to its knees. When Sam throws his vision of how the world will be if this war is finally started in earnest, when he stands in the circle lined with salt and iron and sigils, dredges up the power in his blood to cast this truth out over the demons inhabiting earth, it's a picture of nothing. Deep, pressing silence and a blackness like the void of space, crawling over the dirt of the earth. There's no life - just dry, clinging nothingness that's far more terrible than violence in any imagining._

_And evil withdraws, from the very blood and bone of earth, and Sam drops to the dusty desert ground, bloody and unconscious._

_There’s dust on Sam’s eyelids when Dean steps over the runes and falls to his knees by Sam’s body, sprawled out like a corpse on the blessed ground. He wipes it off, the careful thumb on Sam’s skin trembling. Whispers nothing words and fears to shake his shoulders to wake him, draws a finger down to Sam’s throat and settles the churning in his gut with the pulse he finds there. It’s weak, quivering fitfully, but it’s there._

_The world resumes its sluggish spin days later for Dean, when Sam’s eyes finally blink open._

*

 

“God, you’re such an idiot, Dean.” 

And Dean’s peace is shattered when Sam’s mouth touches his again, broken into fragments that might form a picture of refusal and denial if put together again, but for now, they break. 

Dean breaks, fractures into the slow-cracked seconds of this: Sam’s hands on his neck, fingers spanning the width of his skull and thumbs fluttering at the pulse in his throat; Sam’s lips sliding across his, sipping at his mouth; Sam’s shoulders, his waist, then hips, that shove forward at his touch; Sam’s quick breath matching his, racing over his cheekbones, his eyelids, his lips.

He feels the smile in Sam’s kiss, tugs him closer and savors the taste of it.


End file.
